Description of Historic Place

The Tillet Hills are a Municipal Heritage Property consisting of five non-contiguous quarter sections of land along the Notukeu Creek valley about five kilometres northeast of the Town of Ponteix. The property features at least five archaeological sites containing “tipi rings” and rock cairns. Marine vertebrate fossils have also been found on one of the quarter sections.

Heritage Value

The heritage value of the Tillet Hills sites lies in their ability to illustrate precontact settlement patterns in a particular locality of the Northern Plains. The concentration of tipi rings and other rock features along a short stretch of valley demonstrates the attractiveness of this type of landform for precontact habitation. The arrangements of the rock features show how individual campsites were organized and how the various camps were distributed across the local landscape. Some of the more elaborately constructed cairns may mark burials that reflect the mortuary practices of Saskatchewan’s First People.

Heritage value also resides in the scientific information the property’s fossils reveal regarding the species and paleo-environments of Saskatchewan’s Upper Cretaceous geologic period of approximately 70 million years ago.

Source:

Rural Municipality of Auvergne No. 76 Bylaws No. 92-6 through 92-9.

Character-Defining Elements

The heritage value of the Tillet Hills resides in the following character-defining elements:
-the archaeological sites within their defined boundaries in their natural valley setting;
-those elements related to precontact use of the property, including stone constructions such as stone rings or rock cairns in their original locations, and precontact artifacts, bone, hearths, or other cultural material, especially any objects or features in their original location and context;
-elements related to the life-forms and environments of ancient geological periods, including the stratigraphic sequence of sediments and their contained fossils.